UC Science Today

The ability to accurately predict how cancer patients will respond to chemotherapy before treatment could mean a future of personalized cancer medicines. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis, are working on such a test. Mike Malfatti, a biomedical scientist at the lab, says they’re doing this using their accelerator mass spectrometer, or AMS.

"What we do here at the lab with AMS is a technique that can measure rare isotopes at very low levels and what that gives us an advantage of is we can actually do human studies and be able to trace compounds in humans, which can’t be done very many other places because they don’t have the technology that we have here."

The goal is to develop a test that can predict how a patient will react to a particular drug.

"If you give a drug to someone and they’re not responding to it, but they’re getting the bad side effects, that’s not good. The population that might not respond, you can go and prescribe a different drug."

How does nature create materials that are strong, tough, and lightweight all at the same time? This is a question that researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are trying to answer by looking at the abalone shell. Robert Ritchie says his team has created a ceramic material with the unique properties of the abalone shell in mind.

"Abalone shells are just remarkable. They are extraordinarily tough material, I mean seagulls fly to great heights just to drop it and try to break it, right? The other example though where nature does extremely well is it makes lightweight structures I mean these shells are very lightweight. And that puts it into the realm of the ceramic, which is a very hard, very high tension, very lightweight material."

But the material they made doesn’t look like a shell. It’s a step that Ritchie says is the most difficult to recreate.

"If we can understand how nature does it, the next step is to try to make something synthetically in that image. And that is by far the most difficult step."

What part of the brain do we use when we engage in competitive social interactions such as poker? Dr. Ming Hsu of the University of California, Berkeley says that fMRI scans of participants playing a competitive game similar to poker displayed intense activity in the striatum and the medial prefrontal cortex. Hsu says there are two types of learning processes connected to these regions.

"One is what you can think of as more primitive type of trial and error learning. If it works I do it again, if it doesn't work I stop doing it, I move on to something else. The striatal regions is reflecting computation that seems to be consistent with those types of reinforcement learning models. In terms of these higher order learning, like if I’m playing poker, I don’t want to just do what works. I also want to anticipate what you’re going to do and respond to your actions. So this type of anticipation and learning, what we call belief learning is more reflected in activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is more hierarchically involved and more human if you will."

A global snapshot of key coral reef fishes has revealed that overfishing has led to a reduction of more than fifty percent of vital seaweed eaters. Coral reef ecologist Jennifer Smith explains that without these herbivorous fish, weedy algae can take over the reef landscape…and the impact is multi-faceted.

"One of the most important ecosystem functions that coral reefs provide, is they build reefs. So, if the corals go away, that reef building capacity is no longer there. If you get a reef overrun with fleshy weeds, it turns into a system that actually starts bio-eroding and kind of falling away. So, you lose all of those ecosystem services; you lose the ability for that habitat to provide protection from your island; many people go to the tropics to go snorkeling or diving and if you have a reef that is dead and covered in seaweeds, you no longer have what people are there to look for, so you lose that economic revenue."

A team of engineers at the Lawrence Livemore National Laboratory has been working on a collaborative project to create an implantable, microfabricated neural device that has the potential to help members of the military with traumatic brain injuries and possibly help others with Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. Research engineer Angela Tooker says that’s one of the major applications, but that’s not all.

"We are working on a large number of other applications as well. There’s a list of seven neuropsychiatric disorders and that’s another big project. We have auditory implants as well as a number of other things targeting Parkinson’s, major depressive disorders. We have a number of projects across all applications within the neural field."

The lab has been collaborating on the project with neurosurgeons at UCLA.

"Building the technology is great, but we also need to make sure that we have the right surgical techniques to do it and get the results that we want. At the end of the day, we want to be able to do this safely."

One of the challenges of manned space missions is the cost and that includes the necessity to have supplies on-hand that allow astronauts to survive. Postdoctoral scholar Amor Menezes of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says another challenge is the shelf-life of medical supplies.

"Pharmaceuticals expire quicker in space than they do on Earth. So if an astronaut has a medical emergency in space and the pharmaceuticals or the medication that is required is already expired, is no longer useful, you would have to ship medical supplies, which is tremendously costly, right? Plus, you don’t know if it’s going to reach in time, which means that the astronaut’s life is in danger."

Menezes has been analyzing alternative methods of producing supplies such as food and pharmaceuticals that are less costly to transport through long space missions.

"And so the ability to manufacture pharmaceuticals in real time is very important and it cuts cost, the cost is basically the life and timeliness."

Dealing with toxic materials is an ancient problem. Biologist Amro Hamdoun of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography says there’s a warfare going on all the time in nature.

"For example, plants often defend themselves against insects that try to eat them by making compounds that are bitter or toxic. And those compounds in turn can be recognized by the defenses that are present in the insect and eliminated and there is this constant warfare where each party in this battle is trying to gain a competitive advantage. Over time, organisms have evolved these very robust defenses against these compounds in the environment."

Hamdoun is looking to the sea urchin to better understand how environmental compounds affect humans.

"It has a fully sequenced genome so that we manipulate and study their functions in the lab very readily. I like to say it is a bit like a marine fruit fly."

One of the challenges of manned space missions is the cost and that includes the necessity to have supplies on-hand that allow astronauts to survive. Postdoctoral scholar Amor Menezes of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says another challenge is the shelf-life of medical supplies.

"Pharmaceuticals expire quicker in space than they do on Earth. So if an astronaut has a medical emergency in space and the pharmaceuticals or the medication that is required is already expired, is no longer useful, you would have to ship medical supplies, which is tremendously costly, right? Plus, you don’t know if it’s going to reach in time, which means that the astronaut’s life is in danger."

Menezes has been analyzing alternative methods of producing supplies such as food and pharmaceuticals that are less costly to transport through long space missions.

"And so the ability to manufacture pharmaceuticals in real time is very important and it cuts cost, the cost is basically the life and timeliness."

Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, are potentially deadly air particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter and can be inhaled deeply into the lungs because of their small size. Environmental engineer Josh Apte of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that large urban cities are at greater risk because the particles can come from different sources.

"Traffic is a big contributor to PM2.5. Power plants are a big contributor. Any time you burn something, you’re going to get PM2.5. Because of all the different types of sources that you have in a city, you tend to get sort of a regional cloud of PM2.5. So in terms of the environmental risk factors for death, it’s right up there as one of the most important risks that really takes years and years off of people’s lives when you get a condition that leads to you getting as stroke, for instance, all because you have been living in a city with bad air."

Apte studied traffic-related air pollution in New Delhi, India to develop global strategies for PM2.5 and other pollutants.

"It points to the fact that there’s one major source of air pollution among many in the city that could be brought down quite a bit."

Supernovas are stellar explosions from stars that can be up to hundreds of millions of light years away. And while studying these events might seem trivial to some, senior staff scientist Peter Nugent of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that one reason they’re important is because we are made from the elements they create.

“Everything around us is the product of a supernova explosion. That’s how you convert hydrogen and helium, which were made during the Big Bang into everything else. Carl Sagan once famously said “we are star stuff”. So, the calcium in our bones, the iron that’s in our cars, the gold that we have in our rings – all of that comes from a supernova explosion. So, if you want to understand why there’s what we call nucleosynthesis products in a supernova, why our world is made up of the materials that’s in it, it’s related to a supernova explosion.”